Illumination: Spiritual Emergence and the Evolution of the Soul

Most never travel beyond their personality and ego to understand a psychology that is of a deeper and sometimes darker nature — the dimensions of the soul. In fact, most don't even know what the soul is.

The soul is the multi-dimensional evolutionary body that Carl Jung, the father of depth psychology, defined as the "Self". The soul contains evolutionary memory of the collective legacy of human experience, memories of its previous incarnations, archetypal imprints and the union of opposites — dark and light and male and female.

Defined through its accumulative evolutionary experiences, the soul is multifaceted and transforms and evolves through each successive lifetime of improvement lessons. Some souls are more evolved than others and all hold old wounds that emerge in the human experience as conflicts to be resolved and karma to be completed. First and foremost you are a soul having a human experience that is designed to help you emerge reborn to your oversoul, commonly called your "spirit".

Now, the next question is: What is the spirit? Your spirit is your angelic self, a body of light and higher intelligence that is unified with the Source. Everyone has dark areas of the soul that need healing before they can truly evolve to embody the higher intelligence of their spirit.

One must travel the labyrinth of their soul from time to time to unearth what is hidden deep within. The most direct avenue of soul work is the study of dreams. Dreams emerge from time to time that reveal hidden conflicts and dark areas of the soul that need to be brought to consciousness and healed. The dreams reveal the personal conflicts of an individual soul and also the more collective wounds and conflicts such as, the battle between the light and the dark good and evil.

As souls we share our consciousness with every other soul in heaven and on earth. We are truly one. Their problems are our problems to some extent, because we shared a legacy of experiences and psychic information through a commonality bond. There are issues that are true for everyone. These issues are termed collective issues, because they reside within the collective soul of humanity and everyone has them.

Some of them were imprinted in the beginning into the human soul. The fight between good and evil, immortality versus death, the grief or rage surrounding the violation and degradation of sexuality, the degradation of cultures, races and genders, and the collective sins against the body of the earth and all its creatures, are all examples of collective wounds that reside deep within us. Therefore, battling a dark lord or an evil demon in a dream may remark on conquering a dark side of the soul. This is a battle that each and everyone one of us must win by choosing love over hatred in every instance.

A dreamer sent me a dream the other day for interpretation that she found extremely disturbing. In the dream, there was a young woman who had been raped and then murdered by a gay man, who in the dream was a friend of her friend's ex-boyfriend. The young woman's body decayed and transformed into the bones of her mother, grandmother and those that came before. The dream remarked on a collective wound of sexual violation and disempowerment. The bones of the ancestors mentioned a legacy of degradation carried through from one generation to the next. Not only that, the dream revealed a mistrust of gay men who many still, unfortunately, stereotypically consider sexual predators.

Illumination: Spiritual Emergence and the Evolution of the Soul by Carrieanne Fonger

Those two wounds were up for review not only for the dreamer but also for her best friend, whom the dream seemed to be about. A needed clarification is that rape in a dream does not necessarily represent sexual violation. Sometimes it is a metaphor for domination or the disempowerment of the victim. Pop culture's fascination with vampires, those creatures who derive power by drinking the blood of victims, has its roots in the collective soul.

Since the beginning, souls have shared energy with each other. However, there have always been those who stole the lifeblood psychic energy of others, the majority unconsciously but some knowingly.

Illumination

This sense of connection manifests itself in different ways and at different degrees of intensity as one of the signs of spiritual awakening. At the most basic level, a person may feel strongly connected to other human beings, other living beings in general, or to the whole natural world. A sense of connection to the spiritual force that pervades the whole universe and that forms the essence of our being may occur at higher intensities of wakefulness and is one of the main signs of spiritual awakening.

In other words, we may not just be aware of this spiritual force but also feel connected to it. At a still higher intensity of spiritual wakefulness, a sense of connection may intensify into a sense of oneness. With this symptom of spiritual awakening, a person may feel that they exist in a state of unity with all things — even that they are all things. They may not just feel that they are one with the world but also that they actually are the world.

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This sense of connection is closely linked to the high levels of empathy and compassion associated with spiritual awakening. Love stems from a sense of connection and oneness, a sense that you are another person — or other people — and so you belong to them and share their experience.

Awakened individuals may not live in a state of complete uninterrupted bliss, but they are generally much more content than other people. One major source of this well-being is freedom from the psychological discord that plagues human beings in our sleep state — habitual worry about the future, feelings of negativity about the past, and a general sense of unease.

Illumination: Spiritual Emergence and the Evolution of the Soul

Spiritually awakened people are much less prone to negative states such as boredom, loneliness, and dissatisfaction. The atmosphere of their inner world is less charged with negativity and much more harmonious. The feeling of well-being in spiritual awakening is related to a sense of appreciation.

In wakefulness, people are more likely to feel a sense of gratitude for their health, freedom, loved ones, and other good things in their lives. In our sleep state, we likely take these things for granted and fail to appreciate their true value. Appreciation is an important sign and symptom of spiritual awakening, especially in terms of well-being because it helps free us from wanting. In Buddhist terms , we become free of craving and so free of the psychological suffering this creates.

Fear in general decreases in the wakeful state and fear of death is our most fundamental fear. The ego feels especially fragile in the face of death. This decreased fear of death is related to the transcendence of the separate ego — another sign and symptom of spiritual awakening. However, perhaps the main reason why the awakened person loses fear of death is because of a different attitude toward — and understanding of — death. Our consciousness is just the product of brain activity; when our brain stops functioning, our consciousness ceases, too. But from the spiritually awakened perspective, reality is more complex than this.

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The essence of our being transcends our brain and our individual identity. In the sleep state we have a strong tendency to identify ourselves, to give ourselves labels in order to enhance our fragile sense of self. We like to define ourselves in terms of our religion, ethnicity, nationality, and political affiliation, and also by the labels of our careers, achievements, and qualifications. Defining ourselves in these ways gives us a sense of belonging, and bolsters our egos. In spiritual awakening experiences this need for identity and belonging fades away. People no longer feel affiliated with any particular religion or nationality, just as they no longer feel defined by their careers or their achievements.

They no longer feel that they are Americans or Jews or scientists or socialists. They feel that such labels are superficial and meaningless. Another sign of a spiritually awakened individual is that they often have a similar attitude toward different spiritual traditions , too. As a sign of spiritual awakening, they have an open and ecumenical attitude, and they recognize that different traditions are simply expressions of the same underlying truths.

As a sign of spiritual awakening, awakened individuals have a wide sense of perspective, a macrocosmic outlook.

This means that they have a spiritual awareness of the wider impact of their individual actions. For example, they may decide not to buy or use goods that are produced by exploited workers or oppressive regimes. This wide perspective that occurs as a common symptom of spiritual awakening also means that, for spiritually awakened individuals, social or global issues are as real and important as their own personal concerns. This wide sense of perspective has moral implications. As we have seen, awakened people tend to be more ethical and responsible, more compassionate and altruistic.

But awakening also fosters a more all-encompassing and unconditional type of morality. For spiritually awakened individuals, justice and fairness are universal principles that transcend laws or conventions. They may even break laws and potentially sacrifice their own well-being — perhaps even their lives — in order to uphold moral principles.

In the sleep state, the process of familiarization that switches off our attention to the phenomenal world acts on our conceptual awareness, too. It switches off our attention to things we should ideally feel grateful for. Rather than appreciating what we have, we want more. But awakened individuals do feel grateful after a spiritual awakening. They appreciate the value of their health and their freedom, the beauty and benevolence of their partners, and the innocence and radiance of their children.

They have the ability to count their blessings, no matter how long they have had them. They feel a profound sense of gratitude for small and simple experiences, which is one of the primary signs of spiritual awakening. This sense of appreciation also leads to curiosity and openness. They are the fruits of those inner changes, expressing themselves in terms of new traits, habits, and ways of living.

Spiritually developed individuals are commonly believed to be detached from the world and not particularly concerned about what is happening in it. Their spiritual enlightenment supposedly makes them indifferent to the trials and tribulations of ordinary people in everyday life. We imagine them sitting on mountaintops or in monasteries, basking in their own self-realization.

The following signs and symptoms of spiritual awakening are often present: We have a strong idealistic desire to change the world for the better, an impulse to serve other people and contribute to the human race in some way. We may feel a sense of mission , to help the human race move through our present phase of chaos and crisis into a new era of harmony. Awakened individuals love doing nothing. They relish solitude, quietness, and inactivity.

In humania, which is equivalent to a state of sleep, people find it difficult to do nothing or be alone with themselves because this means facing the discord of their own being and the turbulence of their thoughts. This is another one of the signs and symptoms of spiritual awakening. Rather than fear quietness and inactivity, we enjoy them deeply because they allow us to touch into the radiance of our own well-being. In wakefulness, the impulse to accumulate falls away. In sleep, the urge to accumulate is a response to our sense of incompleteness and fragility.

We try to bolster our sense of self by adding possessions, achievements, and power, in the same way that an insecure king continually builds up a castle and reinforces its walls. Similarly, we become overly attached to preexisting aspects of our identity, such as our appearance or our intellect. We derive a sense of specialness from them, which also serves to reinforce our fragile sense of self.

But these efforts are no longer necessary when we wake up because that sense of incompleteness and vulnerability no longer exists. Awakening brings a shift away from accumulation to contribution. The energy that people invested to try to alleviate their own psychological suffering is now redirected to try to alleviate the sufferings of others. In the sleep state, most people are products of the environment they are born into.